that post about kenochoric has got me thinking about the fact that it’s just really obvious that not everyone views gender in the same framework and it causes a lot of mutual confusion and frustration from everyone
i think that is ok though. it’s normal in big communities of shared experiences for people to not have the same perspective. i love you autonomous gender umbrellas and i also love you xenogenders. we may not be the same exact experience, and we may not always understand everything about each other, but who gives a shit
ok so i napped. get ready for a lethe ramble [first on this blog. yay.]
so… “kenochoric” can’t really be defined, like how man and woman and whatever can’t be perfectly defined either. someone can give pointers for how it can feel, or things that remind them of it. things that are kenous, if you will. kinda like how someone can point at a frilly bow and say it looks feminine. but it doesn’t actually define what a woman is, because there’s no answer for that. you’ll notice that every time someone’s tried to reeeally pin down a prescriptive definition, it’s inevitably excluded some group of women out there from the definition. it does more harm than good trying to “figure out the secret” of what a gender identity really is. there’s no answer for most identity like that, because they’re social constructs that are defined through large numbers of people who have that experience. they can all tell you personal recounts of how it might feel for them, but that’s it. the person next to them might have a completely different experience, but they both still have it
yes, some terms have more concrete definitions. but that is because over time, the community using them has come to a general consensus on what the term broadly means. even then, there is dispute and there are outliers, and it leads to a ton of in-fighting. just look at the term “lesbian,” and how people have waged war over what pronouns you can use or if you can be nonbinary while using it, because what “lesbian” means is still ultimately defined through the people who have been using it, and what it means to them experience-wise
that’s part of why things like kenochoric and whatever are autonomous and kept self-contained, despite the existence of overlap. trying to pinpoint it or give it one, solid meaning, especially through a different label or experience, is a losing battle. it will never work for everyone, trying to make it that way only excludes people on accident. you might say it’s under this term. i’d ask why. you might say well, xyz definition of this other term means yours must fit, and i’d say “says who.” how does someone know everything that an experience contains, and the perfect umbrella terms to put them under. you don’t! nobody does. you’re talking to a person about a nebulous piece of their identity, not a dictionary whose job it is to make everything “make sense” in a way gender fundamentally doesn’t
do you get what i’m saying. get more descriptivist about identity and abandon rigid definitions today. for free